Today we welcome Jay Ehret, the Chief Officer of Awesomeness, at The Marketing Spot. The Marketing Spot is all about transforming entrepreneurs into marketers…and businesses into brands. As Jay likes to say "Power to the Small Business"

There are so many ways to for a small business to market their brand today, thanks to Web 2.0. Owners are hearing they need a Fan Page on Facebook, their website needs SEO, they need a Twitter account, etc. What is one thing a small business should focus on?

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The thing I notice nowadays is, when brands put something on the web they say "find us on Twitter, find us on Facebook, or find us on LinkedIn". But why do we need to do all three? You need to concentrate on one area if you are going to do social media. I also just want to say this, not that I am for or against using social media, but there is no hard data that says social media marketing is more effective than any other form of marketing out there. I can be effective for some businesses. So I want to caution businesses not to use social media as an excuse not to have a website.

Concentrate on having one central location on the web, even if you do social media. You want to direct your traffic back to your website, because we don't know what's going to happen with social media. You don't own your Facebook page or Twitter account. Do I need to remind you about what happened with Ning? Utterz is social media channel that went out of business, Facebook makes constant changes and privacy is an issue there. So think of social media as part of your marketing strategy that is also part of your total online presence. Have that one central location, your anchor on the web, which is your website.

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Many bricks and mortar businesses have let their websites age. I like that you are suggesting businesses start with their website, and work on updating the infrastructure there so that when using social media, you can drive people back to a website that has a web 2.0 look.

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You don't need to spend a bunch of money on a website. One day I sat down with a client in Starbucks and we used the Wi-Fi and we put a website up in 19 minutes from start to finish from getting the domain name, to taking the site live. But with WordPress it's easy for small businesses to manage and update the content on their own website and do it instantaneously. There's no excuse for a small business not to have a website, hosting costs you as little as about $90 a year, a domain name costs around $10, so for $100 for your own website if you are willing to do some of the work yourself.

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I think many small business owners aren't aware of things like WordPress, so they do think that website design process is going to be very expensive.

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Yeah, they're getting quoted $10,000 give or take, which is a big investment for a small business.

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Well you do pay for the knowledge that you don’t have and you've hit on a point, George, you do have to pay attention. The hard costs are minimal. If you are willing to invest some time, you'll be able to find blogs and podcasts that will provide you with free guidance on how to get your business website online.

Great podcast and very sage advice. I had a client that had a MySpace page back in the day with over 50,000 fans. Someone hacked the site and they lost all of their years of work and relationships with no way to retrieve it. You always want to use social media to engage a dialogue, but find a way to get those relationships back to your own site.

[…] Does your business really need social media? Jay Ehret of The Marketing Spot is a big user of social sites like Twitter, but in this podcast, Jay argues it may not be for everyone. Besides focusing on way too many of these social media sites at once, Jay says many businesses make the mistake of ignoring work on the single most important place in cyberspace, their own Websites. BiggSuccess.com […]

[…] Does your business really need social media? Jay Ehret of The Marketing Spot is a big user of social sites like Twitter, but in this podcast, Jay argues it may not be for everyone. Besides focusing on way too many of these social media sites at once, Jay says many businesses make the mistake of ignoring work on the single most important place in cyberspace, their own Websites. BiggSuccess.com […]